The ongoing story of the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys has always had a side to it of speculation and intrigue. At the heart of this story is the assertion by Democrats that the removal of these attorneys was a politically motivated purge at the highest ranks of the Justice Department. They contend that U.S. attorney’s who refused to focus on partisan prosecutions, particularly those related to the great scourge of our time, voter fraud, were replaced with conservative loyalists from the Bush administration's inner circle who would do the bidding of the White House from the safe confines of the Department of Justice.
An important question that has not gone unasked, but has until now largely gone unanswered begs consideration. If these 8 competent and apparently very dedicated attorney’s were fired as has been posited by Bush administration critics because they refused to pursue bogus prosecutions designed to soil Democratic political candidates during the November 2006 congressional elections, what was done by other U.S. attorney’s that allowed them to escape the White House pink slip?
What follows is a story that may be but one answer of many to that question - exposing a brazen abuse of power that reaches deep into the inner sanctum of the White House. The U.S. attorney story is not neat or sexy. There are many players, there are missing emails, poor memories, and countless pieces to this mind numbing puzzle. The story of Georgia Thompson may elicit more questions than answers – but they’re questions that sorely need answering.
In January 2006, Georgia Thompson, a purchasing division supervisor with the Department of Administration for the state of Wisconsin was indicted on two federal felony charges related to the renewal of a $750,000 travel contract awarded to Adelman Travel. Although she was but one of seven members of a committee that evaluated the travel proposals, she was said to have engineered a move to take "best and final" offers that resulted in the reversal of an outcome which had initially shown an Adelman competitor to be the most favorable bid.
The charges claimed fraud and misapplication of funds. Adelman Travel’s chief executive, Craig Adelman had made donations to Wisconsin’s Democratic Governor Jim Doyle in the amount of $10,000 over a ten-month period. The indictment did not explicitly allege that the contract was awarded in exchange for the legal donations. At the time of the indictment, Gov. Doyle was engaged in a campaign to be the first Democrat in 30 years to be elected to a second term as Governor of Wisconsin. Before the ink had dried on the indictment, Doyle's Republican opponent seized the opportunity to publicly accuse him of ethical lapses.
The indictment in the case against Georgia Thompson was signed by Steven M. Biskupic, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Wisconsin.
Ms. Thompson, 56 years old and single, was portrayed during the trial as a very private person, largely apolitical and an exemplary civil servant. She maintained her innocence throughout, arguing that she had no knowledge of political connections, did not gain financially from the deal and was only trying to save taxpayers money.
In June 2006, Ms. Thompson was convicted of the federal charges - found guilty of manipulating the travel bidding to "cause political advantage for her supervisors" and bolster her own job security. Thompson was sentenced to 18 months in a federal prison in Illinois. Gov. Doyle, although certain to have suspected that a Republican smear campaign was at work in this case, was never publicly supportive of the plight and predicament of Thompson, preferring instead to distance himself from the “scandal” during his reelection campaign – perhaps rightly. To do otherwise would have likely eroded his support enough to swing the tight election to his Republican challenger.
As the indictment hadn’t, the subsequent court proceedings never identified the contract bid-fraud as a “play-for-pay” scheme between the incumbent governor and the travel company. That however didn’t stop State Republican Party Chairman Rick Graber from going on the attack immediately after the conviction. He said Thompson's trial "showed how far this (Governor Doyle’s) administration is willing to go to reward political cronies and campaign donors." The tone of the campaign, which Doyle won, would continue in that vein through Election Day.
On April 6, after serving 4 months of her 18-month sentence, a federal appeals court threw out the conviction of Georgia Thompson, saying the evidence was "beyond thin". In an extraordinary move for a U.S. Court of Appeals, Ms. Thompson was ordered freed within hours of hearing oral arguments, without sending the case back to trial and before the court had issued a written opinion. The written opinion will follow, and we can only hope an objective inquiry into this case looks closely at the presiding trial judge as well, Rudolf Randa, a member of the ultra-conservative Federalist Society. But for now, let us look at the U.S. attorney who brought the case, Steven M. Biskupic.
In documents released on Friday by the Justice Department, Mr. Biskupic’s name had apparently surfaced as a U.S. Attorney who was among those targeted for removal for “underperforming”. His name was later removed from that list for reasons that remain unclear. Biskupic has asserted that he was never pressured to take on politically partisan cases.
After the 2004 elections, Karl Rove wanted evidence that there had been a concerted Democratic criminal conspiracy to stuff the ballot boxes in Milwaukee and New Mexico. Mr. Biskupic was only too eager to pursue what has now been found to be one of the great wastes of time and taxpayer dollars in this partisan voter fraud witch-hunt.
Biskupic, appointed by President George Bush in 2002, formed a Joint Election Fraud Task Force in January of 2005. The U.S. attorney's office, the FBI, the District Attorney, and the Milwaukee metropolitan police department teamed up to investigate. What quickly became clear however was that there was no broad conspiracy to commit voter fraud by the Democrats or by anyone else. Biskupic would continue to do his part by prosecuting individual cases, but much to the disappointment of Rove, the cases – double voting, felons voting - were of such little merit that most were acquitted. Try though he did, Mr. Biskupic was unable to deliver. Might the Georgia Thompson case be just the salve to take the sting out of the voter fraud disappointment?
Finding actual voter fraud ultimately was less important to Rove than generating negative press for Democrats through high-profile Department of Justice investigations. This may be exactly where the Georgia Thompson case comes in - and what may have saved Mr. Biskupic from the U.S. Attorney ax. After Ms. Thompson’s conviction in June 2006, she was featured in negative campaign ads linking her to Governor Doyle and portraying her in the most criminally unflattering ways possible.
Despite the fact that the case was eventually overturned on appeal, the damage to the Doyle campaign was done. And while the damage to Doyle wasn’t enough to cost him the election, the damage to Ms. Thompson was far greater. She was forced to sell her home to pay her bills and attorney’s fees, and she spent 4 months in a federal prison for a crime that never occurred.
When Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez goes before Congress on Thursday to explain his involvement in the firings, perhaps he should be asked if the decision to remove Mr. Biskupic’s name from the hit list had anything to do with the Wisconsin attorney’s aggressive pursuit of a flimsy case who’s sole purpose appears to have been to influence a tight gubernatorial campaign in an important swing state. To this point, Mr. Gonzalez has offered only contradictory accounts and general public befuddlement in explaining his role in the attorney firings. Expecting him to come clean on the Georgia Thompson case or shine even the dimmest of light on the larger scandal would be unreasonable.
The apparent effort to turn the Justice Department into a political arm of the White House is another in a long list of disturbing abuses perpetrated on the American people by the Bush administration. Maintaining and extending the power of the president and the Republican Party has become their soul-suffocating raison d’etre. Putting an innocent woman in jail to influence an election is no less casual a decision for Karl Rove than choosing the color of his tie each morning. It makes one wonder how many other stories like this the U.S attorney purge has engendered.
Diarist note: This diary was inspired by and is issued in honor of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. who left us last week. It also follows closely on the heels of the unspeakable violence in Blacksburg, Virginia. One of Mr. Vonnegut’s true gifts was his ability to create characters that are able to maintain their humanity in the midst of all the worst that life offers. May we all strive for that.